Artist Statement : Personal Mythologies

Myth, legend, and ancient lore reach out and invite me into a world rich with infinite possibility. World music is the magic carpet to my creative process, evoking color, images, and stories without end. All that I am, all that I have experienced becomes my art.

Each time that I enter the studio I am open to thoughts and images touching me from a higher source, a distant place. Music, color, and line become dialogue—paintings unfold. “Our hands know how to settle the riddle which our intellects struggle with in vain.” Rumi

The paradox between Creation and birth and Death and destruction are sometimes revealed in the study of Torah and demonstrated in the sacred literature of most ancient traditions. Leroy Little Bear, a Navajo Elder, has said, “We have reached the limits of our language. Therefore, to exclude anything (i.e., physics, mathematics, biology. or ecology) as separate from visual arts or dance is an inconceivable notion.” Recently in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the conceptual and multi-faceted composer, Tan Dun, premiered Ghost Opera…, “a cross-temporal, cross-cultural, and cross-media dialogue touching on past, present, future, and the eternal,” based on Chinese Shamanistic tradition.

Ancient creation myths parallel scientific reasoning sparking one’s imagination. Through a series of departures and returns, artists and scientists have had to explore new perspectives that have led them to discovery, revelation, and transformations never imagined possible.

My art speaks of an extended human condition extracting an essence and universality out of human events, recasting everyday life to create a new myth. I believe that magic happens when we let spirit guide us. Like the Latin American poet, Jorge Luis Borges, I see a universe in every grain of sand, in every star.

Harriette Joffe, MFA, MA • born 1935 • American

Abstract Expressionism/ New York School Painters

Harriette Joffe is an American painter with a distinguished career that spans from the post-World War II Abstract Expressionist movement to the present, and her lifetime body of work has been described as "Explosive!" by the New York Times.